Modern discoveries in neuroscience are exciting and fascinating. Recent discoveries have given great insight in how the brain works and processes information. Different regions of the brain have been shown to process different emotions and physical stimuli. But introduce these fascinating discoveries into an increasingly materialistic society and one gets interesting metaphysical claims. Many people simply assume that science has put the philosophical stance of substance dualism (aka Cartesian dualism or Platonic dualism, etc) to rest. Look, you can damage the brain and totally change the way a person acts. Or you can stimulate a part of the brain and cause sensations that look like religious experience. Or you can split the brain down the middle and get interesting results. This proves that the brain simply is the mind, or the mind is a phenomena that is purely caused by the physical relations of the neurons and chemicals that make up the brain, doesn't it?
Well no. In fact, this is blatantly fallacious reasoning of the type that John Polkinghorne has called "confused nonsense" (in a response to a question about Daniel Wegner's claims to have disproved dualism and free will here). What we see in neurobiology is correlations between certain states of the brain and certain states of the mind. When a person thinks of a pleasant thought, a certain part of the brain undergoes a chemical reaction. Does this show that that chemical reaction just is the pleasant thought? Well no. Does it show that the chemical reaction is what caused the pleasant thought? No, it actually looks like the pleasant thought caused the chemical reaction.
The problem here is that some have tried to take a correlation between two events, the brain event and the mind event, and equate them. In other words, to say that the brain is identical to the mind. This kind of reasoning can simply never work. Correlation is never enough to show identity or causation. Therefore it is intellectually irresponsible to proudly assert that neurobiology has made mind/body dualism passé. It has done no such thing.
As an aside, this metaphysical confusion has led to other weird reasoning, such as in the field of artificial intelligence. Some people think that at some point we will program a self conscious machine. Get enough electrical connections together in the right configuration and *poof* a new sentient being. While certain theological convictions keep me from thinking this could happen (I think God has an intimate role in crafting the soul and placing it in the body), I also lack any convincing reasoning from strong AI theorists that would entail that configurations of matter are enough to produce conscious, self-introspective, thinking things. The fact that a machine may at some point mimic human behavior doesn't mean that it is experiencing human behavior.